Last time, Heretic TOC showed how the past is being pilloried in an orgy of accusations and recriminations. Among the cultural icons suddenly being denounced is the poet Allen Ginsberg – a remarkable twist of fate for his reputation so soon after being lionised as a crusader for freedom in two recent movies, Howl and Kill Your Darlings. But do those delivering the damning judgements really know what they are talking about? In a guest blog today, Eric Tazelaar points out that the younger generation of commentators would not have known those they now so freely castigate – unlike Eric, who knew Ginsberg personally.

THAT 70S SHOW: A DECADE RE-CONCEPTUALIZED (AND REPURPOSED)

I have often wondered, beginning some thirty or more years ago, what long-term effects anti-pedophile hysteria, then just starting to gather real steam, would have upon children as well as their eventual adult selves.

The results now appear unequivocal and much worse than my worst imaginings so long ago.

“Thou shalt not suffer a paedophile to live!” seems not too strong a sentiment to represent prevailing societal opinion.

As is unavoidable – if one lives long enough – one is increasingly struck by the youthfulness of those high-minded idealists who now predominate among our journalistic detractors, most of whom were not yet born when Britain’s future Labour leaders rubbed elbows with Tom O’Carroll and PIE under the NCCL umbrella.

Many have decided that the decade of the 1970s was not only weird but had to have been almost supernaturally so, like the “weird” witches in Macbeth.

For one columnist, Tim Stanley, writing recently for The Daily Telegraph, the 1970s were not just “weird” but positively infested with “evil” villains actively propagating their “perversion” amongst the credulous and unsuspecting young.

“Evil men once exploited the sexual revolution and the Left’s naivety to advance their agenda and invade the mainstream.”

It couldn’t get much more black-and-white than that, now could it?

To Stanley, Allen Ginsberg, a man whom I knew well and whose amorous attentions, when I was eighteen years old, I politely rebuffed, is said to have been one of those “evil” infectious agents.

I was thunderstruck when I read that. Evil? Allen Ginsberg? Allen was possibly the least evil person I ever knew, unlike Andrea Dworkin whose unconcealed hatred for all things male and an unwavering conviction in the innate superiority of women made her, to my mind, a manifestly dangerous influence upon impressionable minds.

Stanley quotes her as having said of Ginsberg: “exceptionally aggressive about… his constant pursuit of under-age boys’’.

To that I say “Bullshit!” Although I was not, at eighteen, “underage” my rejection of his erotic interest in me was immediately accepted and we went on to become friends. Furthermore, I saw him interact many times with actual “underage” boys, none of whom he treated with anything but the greatest of gentleness and respect.

I will add that, of those friendships with boys with which I was familiar, most of whom were children of staff or students at the Buddhist school where he taught, none appeared unwelcome and neither the boys nor their parents showed any evidence of feeling threatened by him. Indeed, he was greatly respected and trusted throughout that community.

Allen behaved exactly as I would wish all people would behave: with the highest regard for the rights and dignity of the individual. One should aspire to be precisely that kind of person.

Clearly, Tim Stanley had never met Allen Ginsberg or Tom O’Carroll. Or Andrea Dworkin, for that matter.

No, Tim Stanley simply possesses the unshakable conviction that every lie, every distortion, every libel uttered about Ginsberg, O’Carroll, PIE or NAMBLA and, for that matter, all paedophiles, rings with an unassailable truth, having been levelled by those with intentions wholly good and pure. To Stanley’s mind, paedophiles and their cause are beyond all redemption and to be utterly destroyed, a process which I see to be well underway.

For Tim Stanley, facing down such irredeemable evil, there is no other side to the story and fact-checking in the interest of those proclaimed as evil simply isn’t required or even seriously considered.

But the state in which child lovers exist today is not the worst of it. An even starker reality which confronts us all is the sad and diminished state in which children and adolescents now find themselves, essentially held captive in what amounts to walled gardens where they are unable to form any contact with others not explicitly authorized or to be exposed to any idea deemed “inappropriate” by any but the most puritanical governess.

They benefit only from the society of other kids within one or two years of age or their families (but often minus Dad) or those adults specifically designated and vetted by the state.

All potentially contaminating ideas and people are carefully filtered-out to prevent their inadvertently contaminating today’s kids who, in their strict isolation, spend less time outdoors in unstructured and unscheduled freedom than ever before.

And, it would seem, when eventually they do grow up, they are often angrier than previous generations of young adults, harbouring resentments and suspicions which might be seen as unavoidable given their isolated and artificial childhoods in which kidnapping and molestation were identified as a continuous peril.

So it should not be surprising that many now also see paedophiles as an underlying source of their own social impoverishment as well as their greatest fear while growing up.

Bogeymen made their childhoods both frightening and constraining and they are, understandably, deeply resentful, even if they are misguided.

So this is where we are now:

• where rebels of genuine courage, many long-dead, are utterly vilified for having spoken that which was so obviously true, while hateful, emotionally unstable, misandrists are lionized for their viciousness and sanctimonious cruelty;
• where children, who have been urged daily – incessantly – not to talk to strangers, grow into adults who resist talking to, or trusting, strangers.

As shocking a reality as it is it should probably not come as a great surprise. The years have spoken and the answer to a question I asked, so many years ago, turns out to be much worse than I then imagined.

THE DAILY MAIL STABLE IS AT IT AGAIN

Back to me again, your usual host. I didn’t need an alarm clock this morning. It was quite alarming enough to wake up to the BBC news on the radio at 7am and hear the sound of my own name in the first item of the bulletin. But mine was just a bit part. The big news – or what The Mail on Sunday is foisting upon the nation as news – turned out to be based on the rabid paper’s latest bid to turn itself from a newspaper into an historical journal.

This new foray back into the 1970s, and into who was supposedly promoting paedophilia at the time, had its crosshairs firmly fixed on a senior judge, Lord Justice Fulford. I’m not going to dwell on this ridiculous story or on the details of my alleged connection with the judge all those years ago when he was a junior barrister. For one thing, I honestly can’t remember the details. All I recall is that Adrian Fulford, as I then knew him, was a courteous, pleasant, thoughtful guy with a serious commitment to civil liberties. I see nothing in that for which he need apologise or express any regrets. High Court judge and the child sex ring (allegedly!) is the place to catch up with these bizarre concoctions if you are so minded.

HERETIC TOC’S FIRST ADVERTISEMENT

Despite having a substantial readership (which probably includes a lot of journalists in the wake of recent publicity), Heretic TOC has not so far been overwhelmed with advertising. We haven’t seen any ads here for prestige cars or designer clothes or fine old whisky, which is a great shame as the money would come in handy. It would seem that for some unknown reason the commercial world isn’t all that keen to have its products associated with children’s sexual self-determination and paedophilia, themes which tend to come up here quite a bit.

We do now have our first ad, though (see sidebar, right). Happily for me, MindGlow Media has decided to make a special promotional offer on my book Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons. Obviously the ad. is limited in space, so on this, the occasion of its launch, I am going to give it a bit of a boost by including below a selection of the more favourable review comments the book has received. Actually, there have been very few non-favourable reviews except for hysterical trashings on Amazon by people who clearly haven’t bothered to read it. So, here goes:

“The most engaging, informed, and generous-hearted book we have on the subject or are likely ever to have. I recommend this book strongly.”Professor James R Kincaid, University of Southern California

“His vivid and insightful commentary is a joy to read.”DJ West, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Criminology, Cambridge University

“… a profound cultural critique of received assumptions about childhood innocence, pedophilic ‘power’, and parental goodwill.”Professor Thomas K Hubbard, University of Texas at Austin

“…the pace of a natural storyteller. This book kept me gripped throughout… a nuanced, thoughtful analysis, backed by thorough research, and at the same time a roaringly good read.”Vitaly (Amazon)

“A recommended read. Not just another book about ‘Wacko Jacko’. There won’t be anything written quite like it.”Richard Green, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, Los Angeles

“…a damned good book! Only the most foolish of people would log onto Amazon and take an ignorant shot at Carl Toms’ work without having read it…”Desiree Hill, blogger

“It’s been many years since I carried a book with me, anxious to read it over everything else in my life…destined to be a classic in the field of sexuality, along with Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Kinsey, and Masters/Johnson…”Sally Miller (Synergy Press)

“Congratulations to Mr Toms for having the courage to write the book that had to be written about Michael Jackson, but no one else dared. The irony of this detailed and cogent look into Jackson’s heart and soul is that it is being condemned by those who ought to embrace it: Jackson’s most faithful fans.”Colton Alexander (Amazon)

“Michael Jackson’s Dangerous Liaisons…is the answer for anyone who still may harbor questions about Jackson’s sexuality. This encyclopedic tome leaves no stone unturned… There is a whole host of references to document all that Toms contends in this book… ”Caz (Amazon)

“The author’s prose is engaging, humorous and dramatically compelling – this is one exceptionally gifted writer who has produced a most persuasive and compassionate volume…Far from coming over as a crazed partisan for paedophilic rape, Toms manages something which Freud, at his best and most heroic, often achieved – discussing issues which the prevailing moral order insists may only be addressed in tones of compulsory revulsion in calm, neutral and sane language. Sometimes, sanity is scandalous.”Ben Capel (Philososphere)

“…fascinating, challenging and discomfiting. Anyone wanting to understand Michael Jackson will need to read it. The idea that pedophilic relationships can be harmless or even beneficial to children is disturbing to many people, including me. The lack of scientific evidence supporting my largely visceral reactions against pedophilic relationships has been one of the most surprising discoveries of my hopefully ongoing scientific education…O’Carroll argues against my intuitions and he argues well.”J Michael Bailey, professor of psychology, Northwestern University

Hard to put down, despite its heft. The style is conversational, engaging, and inviting. It read almost like a mystery story in parts; I couldn’t wait to find out how the next part would be resolved.Dr Pega Ren, sexologist

…a great and absorbing read…Toms’ exhaustive research paints a far more detailed and nuanced portrait of [Jackson] as well as an intricate tableaux of the world he operated within. I was…astounded by a number of revelations…If you’re interested in Michael Jackson, you have to read this book.Eric Tazelaar, BoyChat

Like this:

Related

I just happened upon this story in a brand new online publication “Votiv”. It is about another young man (17 vs. my 18) at the time who went looking for Allen Ginsberg at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

With the rather important difference being that young Marcus Ewert (age 17) wanted explicitly to have sex with both Allen and Bill (Burroughs) and went to Boulder for the express purpose of doing so.

His meeting would be more than a decade after my own but, otherwise, our experiences in meeting Allen were remarkably similar, including it being the annual summer party which kicked off the summer session at the school where they taught. I was enrolled in Allen’s Poetics class which would be starting in the next several days.

They both had drinks in their hand when they first saw me. Bill hung back a bit while Allen approached me, curiously, putting his arm around me and saying simply “honeeey…”.

As I mentioned earlier, I figured it was a good time to tell him (with both of his arms around me) that I was a total boy lover (hint, hint) and, yes, to answer his next question, pretty exclusively at that. No problem. Allen went on talking to me, regardless, but with just one arm now and more casually draped over my shoulder.

Bill would occasionally interrupt him to either mumble to agree or disagree or offer additional barely audible details.

The other thing that took me back was the author’s mention of the ‘Varsity Apartments’. These were terrible, prefab, flimsy and cheaply constructed student slums common during that time for the purpose of warehousing University of Colorado students (mostly freshmen who didn’t know any better).

Most students took off for the summer which meant that Naropa could put its “star” summer visiting faculty up cheaply in the oddly spacious but grim two story townhouses.

As it turned out, I was staying there, too and had only just arrived a week or so earlier.

Allen and Peter lived a bit further down in their own townhouse and Bill lived in yet another. For awhile, Kate Millet was staying next door to me. She was a very sweet lady and a bit sad, I thought. I once knocked on her door to tell her goodbye as I knew she was leaving Boulder, her own guest lectures finished.

She eventually dragged herself to the door, sleepily, and I knew I had awakened her. No matter, she was happy I had done so and hugged me and wished me a fine future. That was the last time I would see her.

That summer was, for me, quite eye-opening, especially for a young man like me who had just managed to escape the conformity of the midwest and who had, ultimately, done almost nothing and had seen almost nothing of the world before.

There were a few celebrities who popped in, like Jane Fonda and her then-husband Tom Hayden. Also Daniel Ellsberg. We were all off to protest the Rocky Flats Nuclear Bomb Plant a few miles away. My friend Tim and I baked quiches and apple cobbler for all of us to celebrate the end of a successful demonstration even if the bombs hadn’t been moved an inch.

Poet Ed Dorn who wrote ‘Gunslinger’ (and who had a total babe of a son) was introduced to me by Allen and had a very big influence on my writing.

And then there was Federico Fellini and Roger Ebert. A young nobody, I was meeting people who I had previously known only through books, television, and the movies.

This is what is missing from any discussion of the harm said to flow from intergenerational relationships. Opportunity. Opportunity to meet and learn from others whose lives are already well underway. To form life-long bonds as well as temporary ones and to gain skills and capabilities through mentoring with the goal of independence. To have experiences young people might never have if they were relegated exclusively to their own age cohort.

We are misperceived in the world’s most diabolical way. We have got to take control of the narrative. We just do!

Thanks for reminding me. I do need to mark this date in some way before the day is out. But no, the above is all completely true. The great thing about becoming friends with someone famous is that they will introduce you to other famous people. Thinking back on it all now, my life was immeasurably more interesting during those years as a young man, not least for having had loving relationships with boys myself. I was both a protege and a mentor. Now, I am neither.

All that is meant by that is the person’s morals. Might be no harm but would be wrong in the person’s eyes. I think that is what is meant. Or, maybe in the eyes of the society a person lives in or in the law. That is what I use to consider my actions. I might think no harm will come of my action but it would be wrong because the law says it is wrong whether I like it or not. I will not do it because it would be wrong. But all along I will be thinking of ways to change the law. There are probably lots of other angles to this that I am not thinking of right now.

What you seem to be saying is that if something you think is right is forbidden by law, you nevertheless believe that you have a moral duty to obey the law, even a bad law, or you believe that disobeying the law causes harm and that is against your morality. Or, similarly, but replacing the law with the customs of the time and place you live.

Clovernews,
Rind said that historically and now harmfulness in many instances has not been or is not now a requirement for something to be legally forbidden.

Yes it would be against my morality to break the law. Wish I had had that morality before I did and was punished. Sure has complicated things. It has more than complicated things for many: beatings, suicide, banishment, poverty, death.
Linca

What NCCL proposed in 1976 was an age of consent of 14, and ‘rebuttable presumption’ of non-consent from age 10. That is, they said, if charges were brought concerning a sexual contact with someone aged 10-13, the court should presume that person did not and could not consent, but that presumption could be overturned (and the defendant acquitted) if the defence proved that the young person (a) understood the nature of the act and (b) actually did consent.

Actually, looking into it further, it seems they supported both at different times. It was your version (age of consent 14, with extension down to 10 for near-agemates) that was in their proposal to the government. Sorry for the confusion.

You state that “I think it helps us to admit that feminists who are opposed to paedophiles are right about an awful lot of things. They are right to be concerned about power imbalances in human relationships, about the potential for exploitation, and about the objectification of children.”
No, the feminists are *not* right that we should place those concerns above other concerns.
The feminists have developed their “theories” (which are not, by the way, based on any empirical research, and therefore cannot be accepted as “fact” or as something nearing “the truth”). Feminists – in their “theories” of how men supposedly “objectify” women – insist on stereotypes of men (which the feminists themselves have developed) and which – are you ready? – objectify men!
The (assumed) “power imbalances” are a red herring. Power imbalances do not, in and of themselves, determine that one person will always (or usually, or even often) take unfair advantage of another person. And an important point to remember is that one cannot be easily exploited when one is *informed*. Young people, if informed, are not particularly susceptible to being exploited. On the contrary, they strongly resist exploitation! This has been demonstrated by empirical research, particularly in the marketing industry. Young people can be very discerning consumers!
The “potential for exploitation” exists in *every* relationship. Most people do not exploit the “potential for exploitation” which may exist in relationships between themselves and others. This is another red herring used to indiscriminately damn males – including homosexual minor-attracted persons.
In my humble (but I believe fairly well-informed) opinion.
I suggest you switch to another beverage – the commonly-available Kool-Aid is known to rot not just the teeth.
— Just A Guy

I think you are muddying the waters by suggesting that feminism is only a “theory” because it lacks empirical evidence. Well, indeed, feminism isn’t a science. I’m not aware that feminists have ever claimed to be scientists. A “theory” is not the opposite of a “fact,” or even a second-rate fact. A theory is not a hypothesis. A “theory” is a conceptual tool, an interpretive framework for making sense of facts – and the ‘fact’ that feminism interprets is the lived experience of men and women. It may do this more or less well, but claiming that feminism is “just a theory” is as naive as saying the same thing about evolutionary theory.

In a trivial sense, of course, you are correct to say that there will be power inequalities in every relationship and that we don’t usually worry about these. Some people earn more than their partners, some have bigger biceps or are judo black-belts. But I think you are deeply wrong about the importance of structural power imbalances such as those between adults and children in our culture. These matter very much if we want to argue that children can and do give meaningful consent to sexual relationships with adults. In a society where children are expected to obey adults and to do what they are told, can it really be argued that children are fully empowered to say ‘no’ when placed in a situation that makes them uncomfortable? (Equally, in a society where children are expected to obey adults, can we expect them to act on their own sexual desires against the programming they increasingly receive in the education system?). Informed and voluntary consent from children may be possible in our society, but equally reluctant and unwilling consent is very possible – this is the kind of acquiescence that children customarily accord to adults. For this reason, I strongly think MAPs need to be acutely conscious of the power issues at stake between adults and children, and ideally I would like to see paedophiles challenging the subordination of children in a wide range of spheres beyond the bedroom (as indeed many already do).

Thanks for your reply, Eric. I agree that there are plenty of opponents all over the political spectrum, but I don’t think they’re all exactly the same. To put it bluntly, not all antis are created equal: some are anti-MAP for good reasons badly misapplied, while others (like Stanley) are just basically wrong about everything. Of course I’m not exactly impartial myself: I suppose I’d say I’m basically on the ‘left’ (wherever that is these days) and I’d certainly say that I’m generally sympathetic to the aims of feminism. For this reason I’m inclined to take criticism of MAPs from feminists (even feminists as illiberal and occasionally incoherent as Dworkin) far more seriously than criticism from right-wingers searching for a socially-acceptable proxy for open homophobia.

I think it helps us to admit that feminists who are opposed to paedophiles are right about an awful lot of things. They are right to be concerned about power imbalances in human relationships, about the potential for exploitation, and about the objectification of children. MAPs would do well to explain that they are (or should be!) concerned about all these things as well. If feminists libel MAPs because they wrongly believe that paedophiles all want to exploit and rape kids, then surely we can at least admit that they are doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Moreover, the feminist critique of patriarchy might strike a chord with MAPs who would see adult control over children as an extension of adult male dominance over and ownership of women. I think there is a lot that could still be achieved from a dialogue between MAPs and feminists on their own terms. I have enough confidence in both sides to think that each might learn something from the encounter. With Tim Stanley, however, I don’t think there’s much point in even trying to reason. Being abused by such a man is a mark of pride. I’d be deeply worried if he ever said anything I agreed with. But then, as I say, I’m hardly a neutral observer.

Kit,
For a long time I was a right winger religious person. I owned and operated a company in one of the most fascist industries in the world, the iron and steel business. No wonder I was fascist in my thinking.

Then I lost that.

Thought I would check out the left wingers. It has taken me a long time to realize they are just as dangerous as the right wingers. Now I can hardly stand to attend meetings of my county Democratic Party even though I trace my democratic roots back to watching with my coal miner grandfather the nomination of Adlai Stevenson to be the Democratic Candidate for President of the United States. We watched it on a black and white television while I was setting with him on the bed where he was dying of cancer. I was 10-years-old.

If you know about Stevenson you will understand that I believe government does good and without government we have nothing, we are lost. I think you think the same thing. I think Tom O does also.

Can you imagine how the assassination of President Kennedy affected me? Probably about like it affected you. Who are these people who have taken over our party, these feminist that study Phrenology, head bumps, and the frontal lobe?
Linca

So when “right-wingers” attack pedophiles it’s because they are malicious and hateful people but when “feminists” or “left-wingers” attack pedophiles it’s because they are well-intentioned but misinformed people? How can you tell? From what I’ve seen they will often use the exact same arguments against pedophiles. The only difference is that feminists will mention patriarchy and right-wingers will mention God. Both myths, by the way. I do not believe we live in a patriarchy today nor am I believer in God.

I have to believe even right-wingers are misinformed and not just malicious bigots, since that seems to imply that they honestly don’t believe there is anything wrong with pedophilia, they only attack pedophiles out of unsubstantiated hate.

I don’t particularly intend to argue that “when “right-wingers” attack pedophiles it’s because they are malicious and hateful people” – though some of them certainly are. My question is not so much what motivates individuals as where points of agreement and dialogue can be found. Speaking for myself, I think that it is easier to argue with (many) feminists, whose assumptions I generally share, than it is to argue with those who believe, for instance, that all sexual activity outside of religiously-sanctioned marriage is inherently wrong and disordered. That’s not so say that the latter group are necessarily malicious or hateful, simply that it is harder to challenge their working assumptions. When a feminist says, “men should not exploit children for their own gratification,” I can wholeheartedly agree. When Iris Robinson declares that “there can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children,” I’m not even sure where to begin.

“When a feminist says, “men should not exploit children for their own gratification,” I can wholeheartedly agree.”
and by so by subscribing to an ideology that as a matter of historical fact is almost entirely responsible for arousing mass hysteria to age-discrepant love affairs precisely by making this defamatory assertion about it, you become a most effective enemy of everything that love stands for.

“When Iris Robinson declares that “there can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children,” I’m not even sure where to begin”
so you leave it open to others who are not burdened with cultural assumptions intrinsically hostile to such love to show how pathetically fragile these assumptions intellectually are and ultimately to bring the whole hate-filled edifice crashing down.

With “friends” like you, who needs enemies? I fall back on Rind ‘s well-argued analysis to demonstrate that hebephilia today is a hopeless cause precisely and only because of values you subscribe to. You are trying to have your cake and eat it.

For those of us who were early adopters of feminism (before so many amongst them embarked upon an agenda of actual female supremacism) we were very much (and still are) critical of the oppression of women as well as children by, in many cases, a ‘patriarchal’ society.

I would argue, however, that their position in much of the world today is massively improved, certainly in North America and Europe. Of those women most in need of liberation, the vast majority are to be found in Africa and the Middle East and in other selective pockets of the developing world.

I find it ironic that few of our first-world champions of women’s rights spend as much time decrying the very brutal conditions in those countries where women are clearly abused as they do the ostensible injustices they claim to encounter in western society.

They have grown rather attached to the perceived benefits of perpetual victimhood, in my opinion.

So, I think that we need to consider the possibility that many of the ‘voices’ amongst feminists (and many non-feminists, for that matter) can do nothing BUT ‘speak’ and are wholly incapable of ‘listening’. Indeed, they are unreceptive to ideas or perspectives not their own.

They appear far more interested in being seen as arbiters of morality and praying, as it were, “ostentiously in the marketplace”. This is classic puritanism. And Salem was a natural outgrowth of puritanism.

Given that, I’m not sure that we can hope to influence them by portraying ourselves as slavishly benign and worshipful at their feet or even by appealing to their sense of reason or justice.

I’m not even convinced that reason or justice are goals which they pursue.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I suspect they often possess darker and unexamined motives, jealousy being one that comes to mind and lust for power over others being another.

As for potentials for children to be abused, raped, and subject to power imbalances, etc., our organizations have always been at the forefront in insisting that their rights be secured well beyond those they enjoy today.

We have pointed out that abolishing age-of-consent laws, for example, will not diminish the rights of kids but expand them.

Men (and women) would still be thrown in jail for violating their rights (including coercing them into sex) or causing demonstrable harm.

In fact, we demand that actual rape, i.e. forcing sex upon someone against their will, be punished. I’m not sure how much more clear we could be about that.

I just question the extent to which many ‘feminists’ (or right-wing conservatives or even the great, bulging ‘middle’) are acting in good faith and receptive to evidence that contradicts their preconceptions.

That doesn’t mean that I think we have done a great job in communicating our beliefs. We haven’t. But even when we do it seems to make little difference to the ‘dominant narrative’, whatever its politics.

However, we do have to keep trying and, yes, affirm our own positions. But we also need to broaden the conversation and point out facts inconvenient to our accusers. In fact, there is a huge amount of work that is needed to be done that is not being done.

I think that one makes a rather serious error in judgement by allowing the stated concerns and strawmen advanced by the anti-paedos to continue to successfully hijack our message. We must continue to respond to their accusations forcefully and without fail, but we should not consider that that alone will be enough.

We need to be far less ‘reactive’ and ‘defensive’ and our sense of fairness (and morality) far more ‘offended’ (as you can tell mine certainly is).

At this point, we’ve got plenty of dirt on them. We should not hesitate to throw it in their faces.

“I find it ironic that few of our first-world champions of women’s rights spend as much time decrying the very brutal conditions in those countries where women are clearly abused as they do the ostensible injustices they claim to encounter in western society.” I certainly agree with you there.

“I find it ironic that few of our first-world champions of women’s rights spend as much time decrying the very brutal conditions in those countries where women are clearly abused as they do the ostensible injustices they claim to encounter in western society.”

It’s harder to criticize a country and culture that you do not belong to. Most western people’s “education” about these developing countries come from reading what’s in western newspapers. It’s easier, and perhaps more moral, to judge something that you have actually experienced first hand. Most western people, myself included, are honestly ignorant about life in these other countries. I wouldn’t want to start a huge campaign based on something I only read about without actually having lived there. Perhaps if these feminists are serious about women’s rights they should consider moving. I would happily donate to the cause.

girllover: I do tend to feel myself that people from culture A should not come charging in and tell people from culture B how to run things. This applies especially when culture A members have vastly more power in the world as a whole than do culture B members. Yes, abuse of power: here it applies.

However, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in a country where abortion is always illegal, even to save your life, and is so frequently suspected and aggressively prosecuted that women – usually poor, young, illiterate or semiliterate women – have been sentenced to long prison terms because they’ve genuinely miscarried. You can’t even get hold of misoprostol as Cytotec: they’ve thought of that. The daily burden of fear that this puts on you is indescribable, and I never noticed that the women I knew who were from there seemed to feel it with substantially less intensity than I did as a foreigner.

I should also have answered this sooner, but I hope some will still read it. Girllover is absolutely right that outsiders should not come barging in, even figuratively from afar, to purport to tell those of other cultures how to live their lives.

I’ve lived in numerous countries all over the world, and before my young (OK, middle-aged), impressionable self left the cocooned environment of America a couple decades back, I shared many of the assumptions trumpeted in the mainstream media. I’ve lived in both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. For obvious reasons, I did to speak to many women in Saudi, but in Kuwait I met a Saudi woman who left over a decade before to marry a Kuwaiti. After she picked me up in her SUV, I mentioned that it must be nice, being able to drive, something she was not allowed in the Kingdom. She told me that actually, she liked it better in Saudi because there, if she needed to go anywhere, her husband or a male relative would chauffeur her around. She was not brimming with any “activism” to “liberate” Saudi women, nor did I perceive that while I was in that country either. Indeed, there were women who fiercely defended their way of life. I find the cultural chauvinism of those who purport to speak for others they don’t even know in a far-off culture highly repugnant.

Just when did minding one’s own business go out of favor as a social value? The world would be a better place (especially for MAPs!) if we could get back to that.

Thank you Eric. I have a sneaking feeling we may have had a very similar discussion elsewhere.

I have to admit, my view of contemporary feminism is a bit less jaundiced: perhaps because I tend to encounter it in an academic environment, I find the feminists I know are generally better at listening to other voices than you might suppose (this is helped by the fact that ‘feminism’ is now such a broad and querulous movement that between any two self-proclaimed feminists you are sure to have three mutually-irreconcilable opinions on anything – a little like boylovers in that respect!). One of the strongly emerging trends I sense among academic feminists, however, is a sense of the urgent need to open up middle-class Western feminism to outside voices: especially the voices of women from developing nations, women from ethnic and religious minorities, and women from marginalised sexual groups (such as prostitutes and trans-women). Rather than just telling Muslim women or lesbians what they ought to be doing, feminists are now insisting upon the need for allowing these groups to speak for themselves. This, I think, is part of the reason why Western feminists are increasingly reluctant simply to wade in and start laying down the law to men in developing countries: because they think that doing so would be an arrogant appropriation of the agency of women in those countries who may very well have their own very different moral and political outlook. I think this growing willingness of feminism to listen to contesting voices may be of benefit to MAPs. Sure, feminists may be sceptical towards adult men who want the right to have sex with children (though not all feminists I know are, and many in fact have quite nuanced views on this subject). But it is more difficult for them to dismiss the voices of girls and women who have been in such relationships, including women MAPs themselves.

I suppose it is possible that some feminists are motivated by jealousy and lust for power, though I can’t honestly say that my experience would suggest this is the case. There are some feminists who are bitterly and viscerally hostile to MAPs, but my feeling is that these are mostly people who are deeply hurt and in some cases damaged and unstable (as Andrea Dworkin certainly was) rather than purely malicious. And even if some of them are not arguing in good faith, it seems to me we have no option but to reply to them as though they were. I had not intended my post especially as a critique of the existing paedophile movements, which I think have mostly done a creditable job of trying to put their argument forward under hostile conditions. But if there is one thing I do think MAPs could be better at, it’s in understanding the motives and character of our opponents and tailoring our arguments to make them least repellent to them. Some people have good reasons for fearing or hating paedophiles. It is not slavish or grovelling to try to convince them to look past their fears, but it may require us to acknowledge that they are not entirely in the wrong.

I really appreciate this comment Kit and think you are completely right. From having been a rather misogynistic teenaged girl (it’s a type) I have gradually, over the years, become more and more of a feminist, simply from the experience of living as a woman.

There are feminists these days who do wonderful, and underappreciated, underpaid and widely attacked, work as sex educators for teenagers. Heather Corinna of Scarleteen.com comes to mind. While very sex-positive, she is none too keen on relationships between adolescents and older people. And from reading her stuff, I’ve gone from blanket disagreement with her on that to realising that she probably has a point in some respects. Because of her line of work, she’s seen things I haven’t seen, like teenaged girls in relationships with somewhat older men who really are being manipulated and fed a line of nonsense because they’re too young to know any better. And the data on this kind of thing don’t look any too good, either. There are studies from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, for instance, indicating that teenaged girls whose partners are half-a-dozen years older are less likely to use contraception, more likely to contract a sexually transmitted infection, etc. In some cases, the girl probably just has a risk-taking sort of personality, hence the relationship with an older guy, the taking chances about pregnancy, etc. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that very often the older guy is being a jerk. And in the face of evidence like that, which good feminist women working in abortion counselling, for instance, see up close and personal all the time — well, no wonder they’re against age-gap relationships.

The point to be made is that these relationships don’t have much to do with child-love. We’re talking about sixteen-year-old girls going out with twenty-three-year-old men: nothing unusual about that at all. And we are probably talking about teenaged girls who are disproportionately black, Latina, working-class and poor, who are getting the short end of the stick and by their teens know this perfectly well, know that they don’t have much of a future, know that their bodies may well be the only thing about them considered valuable. We’re talking about communities where a twenty-three-year-old man may be going out with a sixteen-year-old girl just because all the women his age are already working exhausting jobs for very little money and/or are chasing several toddlers. It’s a whole mess of things, but it isn’t representative of child-love.

Likewise, the feminist factions who talk about ‘sexualisation of children’ have a point. Being sexualised is different to being sexual: to be sexual is to act and choose, whereas to be sexualised is to be acted upon, subjected to other people’s notions about sex. We’re not doing anybody any favours by allowing the putting about of a lot of sex-related ideas that are at best ill-fitting for quite a lot of people and at worst howlingly reactionary. And I do think those kinds of ideas are being put about more than in the recent past.Twenty years ago, consumer goods for kids weren’t as heavily gendered as they are now, with all the pink-princess-sparkle for girls and the musclebound superhero T-shirts for boys. My feeling, which various people have told me they share, is that the current young generation’s ideas about gender and sexuality are actually more conservative than those of the generation before or the generation before that. And, well, kids are hitting puberty earlier, and for young girls especially, that’s not a barrel of laughs — you are still a child mentally, you just want to play on the swings and at the swimming pool, but you’ve grown breasts, and Strange Men take that as a good reason to shout at you in the street or to grab you and try to pull you into their cars. This is a common memory for women to have — it happened to several friends of mine when they were eleven or twelve — and women getting angry about ‘sexualisation of children’ are speaking from memories like that. Where I part company from the mainstream feminist position (insofar as there is such a thing, which isn’t very far) on this is in thinking that there is nothing wrong with sex at any age provided that it is consensual and, ideally, strongly wanted and engaged in with full agency and mutual care. You know, yes means yes and all that. Those ideas are already present in feminist thought. Their big flaw is that they shut out children and those who love them.

One time a year or so ago Eric Tazelaar pointed out that the woman that hollered at the NAMBLA group in the film “Chickenhawk” was now prominent in government human rights protection that of course would not consider his requests. I believe it was the last time NAMBLA marched openly in a Gay Pride Parade. What a hateful person she was and still is. A person without knowledge. A person with power.

Those are the feminists who we need to learn how to challenge head on. Who was that person Eric?
Linca

Samples of Heather Corinna: it would probably be unwise to link to Scarleteen on this blog, but you can do a websearch for some of her articles, of course. A good one to search is “a calm view from the eye of the storm: hysteria, youth and sexuality”. Also search “rage of consent” and have a read (note: I agree with the article as a whole but I disagree with the importance she assigns to puberty – in my view puberty is neither the beginning of sexuality nor the end of childhood nor a sign of mental maturity). Then search “why I deeply dislike your older boyfriend” and read that. When a person who has written ‘Rage of Consent’ in 2001 turns round and writes ‘Why I Deeply Dislike Your Older Boyfriend’ in 2008, you have to figure it’s for a good reason. It’s because of what she’s seen in her line of work. When certain feminist groups talk about abuses of power, they aren’t entirely making it up, nice as it would be to think they were. They aren’t totally wrong-headed. Sometimes, they are just overgeneralising, partly due to lack of information.

For a dialogue between feminists and MAPs around this, I always think a good place to start would be ‘Sexuality, Violence and Psychological After-Effects’, Michael Baurmann’s authoritative study of the 8058 ‘sexual victims’, females up to 20 and males up to 14, who were known to the police in Lower Saxony in 1969-1972. I feel that it vindicates both some central feminist ideas and some central ideas held by those who want to legalise adult-child sex.

A large majority of the children and adolescents in the study were girls; 99.6% of the adult ‘perpetrators’ were men, mostly ages 25-35. 70.3% of the adults were known to the kids; the rest were mostly exhibitionists – 93% unknown to the kids.

51.7% of Baurmann’s subjects fell into group 1: children who had had comparatively ‘mild’ sexual contacts with adults or had been flashed by a strange exhibitionist. Most were not considered ‘injured’ (physically or mentally damaged) by the experience. This group contained some of the girls and every last one of the boys.

Group 2, 11.6%: All girls, mostly with ‘disturbed’ family situations, who had had ‘more intensive’ sexual contact with adults, some of it incestuous. Some of the girls showed no injury; others showed injury which fell within the average range for the entire investigation – i.e., was not extremely severe. It seems reasonable to assume that their ‘disturbed’ family situation may well have contributed, in some cases more so than the sexual contact, to the emotional damage they sustained.

Group 3, 31.3%: All girls, who had suffered “sexual assaults under duress, rape and sexual contacts with highly emotional defensive behaviour or attitude of the victim.” These incidents were reported immediately to the police. The girls in this group had the highest injury index.

So what does this tell us?

Can it really be the case that no boys at all were raped or sexually assaulted in Lower Saxony during those four years? Male-on-male rape and sexual assault go unreported even more frequently than male-on-female rape, in large part because of homophobia and other messed-up ideas about masculinity. Female-on-male and female-on-female rape and sexual assault exist, but are very often not even considered possible. But even if we assume, for safety’s sake, that some boys were raped and sexually assaulted and it just didn’t get reported, and that more women and older girls were raping and sexually assaulting than the very few who were reported, the inescapable conclusion is that the burden of sexual violence and coercion fell very disproportionately on women and girls, and that men and boys were overwhelmingly the ones responsible. Score one for feminism.

On the other hand, many of the girls in this study were not considered ‘injured’ at all. It is then possible for a girl-child, as for a boy-child, to have sex with a man and not be harmed in any way. This seems more likely if the sexual activities are ‘mild’, but is apparently quite possible even if they are ‘more intensive’. And surely that should be good news for everybody.

We know from other studies that rapists tend to have a history of violence and sexual assault. However, this doesn’t mean that every one-time groper will become a rapist. Baurmann points out that the fondlers and flashers in his study apparently kept fondling and flashing, comparatively harmlessly, rather than progressing to rape. In other words, totally demonising such people is not called for and not helpful.

I would bet quite a lot of money that of the adults concerned, most of the paedohebephilic ones were the older partners of all those unharmed children in group 1. Group 2 was quite small and contained, among other things, incestuous contacts: a classic situation of this type, seen sadly often, involves a stepfather whose usual preference is not for children drunkenly fondling his stepdaughter, or outright raping her. Group 3 also probably contains relatively few paedohebephiles. The girls involved were mostly 14-20 and the men an average of 7 years older. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of the ‘victims’ of ‘sexual assault on children’ were aged 7-13 and for the study as a whole the average age difference between adult and kid was 25 years. Apples and oranges.

Since Baurmann’s study was published, David Lisak, Paul Miller and Stephanie McWhorter have contributed to the development of a ‘predator theory’, backed up by much solid data. Most rapes, it seems, are committed by a smallish minority of distinctly unpleasant men who rape over and over, and who typically start raping in their late teens. Statistically speaking, a small minority of such men must be paedophiles, and somewhat bigger minority must be hebephiles. But most paedohebephiles aren’t like that just as most other men aren’t.

Finally, Baurmann says that those subjects considered injured – again, all girls — “often had been brought up with relatively strict regulations concerning going out in the evening”. Could it be that they were raised in an atmosphere of sexual shame and fear, of heavy restrictions on female sexuality, of blame for the victims rather than the perpetrators of genuine sexual assaults and rapes? Could it be that this contributed to their feeling terrible about what was done to them? Score two for feminism.

Thanks for the thanks, Tom! I like the Baurmann because it’s not only large but also exceptionally broad: it includes both sexes, a wide range of ages, sexual acts of all kinds, and presumably (unlike, arguably, RBT’s ‘college samples’) a wide range of socioeconomic levels.

Eric, again I can sit comfortably and hear what you say about how things are for the minor-attracted at this point in time. It is with the intention of being humble and a desire to make positive links that I suggest you look at a blogpiece I posted recently titled “Being liberal is no easy life-choice”. The text seems to link with yours very strongly. (Http: http://takearisknz.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/being-liberal-is-no-easy-life-choice/)

Sorry, I didn’t see your comment until just now. Yes, I have just read the link to your blog and am, although horrified, completely unsurprised at your recent encounter with the Kiwi-Kops (sorry, couldn’t help it).

Some years ago, a friend of mine who had emigrated to New Zealand and lived in Auckland was eventually ‘locked-out’ of that country after it emerged he had provided some free-speech motivated support for a pro-BL organization in the form of meeting space, sales of their newsletter in his bookstore and that sort of thing. Despite not being a BL himself and having some significant reservations with their cause (he and I are not substantially in agreement on this issue) he was run through the media ringer and denounced in Parliament, totally vilified forever more, etc.

I have never visited NZ and, at this point, it is highly unlikely that I would ever be allowed to do so, such is the state-of-affairs which now exists, particularly within the Anglosphere. It’s a pity as I have always wanted to do so and have otherwise traveled throughout the region.

The authorities who undertook to ‘put you on notice’ could just as easily have been on the payroll of any of the English-speaking countries or even any number of non-English-speaking countries, at this point.

They are entirely convinced of the virtue of their mission and their lives, no doubt, filled with meaning and purpose.

I value your comment and I am interested in the person you refer to in your comment as locked out of New Zealand. Some time ago a person living Wellington where I now live did have a real struggle. His name is Gerald Moonen. Is this the person you refer to? He has remained in New Zealand and did move to another part of the country. My impression is he has withdrawn from any form of social debate on the issues of support or the treatment of those who are minor attracted.

Hi Peter, no it was not Gerald Moonen. It was Jim Peron. Just google his name and “New Zealand” and, perhaps, “Rt Hon Winston Peters” and you will be overwhelmed with accusations and counter-accusations. It was a very ugly scene, at the time. The upshot is that Jim lost his bookstore, all of his inventory, his (adult) boyfriend, and a wonderful life due to his having, many years before (mid-to-late ’80’s), allowed NAMBLA to hold meetings in his San Francisco bookstore (before he emigrated to South Africa followed by his emigration to New Zealand). This had been, even further back than the New Zealand fiasco, a major rupture within Libertarian party circles, at the time. I saw it as being a litmus test for authentic libertarianism in which, ultimately, few emerged as authentic libertarians. Children’s rights became a much-underrepresented cause within the Libertarian Party after that. This is why I can partially understand the common misconception amongst those on the left of libertarianism as “conservative” or “rightwing” as so many self-proclaimed “libertarians” are probably only so on economic, rather than on, social, issues.

In NZ I have been alerted to the social shifts and experiments regarding sexual minorities, along with the issue of sexual freedoms for the young, inside my society and culture ever since the early 1970s. What you offer fits inside that well. In the late 1980s there was a move based in Auckland to include a discussion of the new freedoms being lived out by the young inside NZ cities, especially Auckland and Wellington. A radio interview with men living in Auckland who came out as interested in the young and who viewed the social relations between the generations as involving agency for the young peeked this move.

This social experiment was undermined by two events. First a suicide by one of the group after his house was entered by the NZ police, and second when the NZ Aids Foundation, at that time a group profiled as a gay men’s group rather than a diverse group moved to respond to a media issue, sent out a clear message minor attracted men cannot be gay. The pedophile identity as we came to have it offered to us was thus politically given a new birth inside NZ politics.

The political leadership of the NZ gay lobby acted as one. I make no comment on real representation claims of those leaders. The political catch cry of the day regarding AIDs and homosexual men as the phrase “men who have sex with men”, not men who have sex with other males. The political goal of the gay liberation movement in NZ was to eject minor attracted men. This mythology that gay groups do not have any members for whom relations with the young is part of how sexual desire is experienced for them joined with the other mythologies of the NZ sex abuse movement – the notion no child ever mislead (lie) about an adult sexually abusing them; that no child or youth would ever consent to sexual friendships with other partners who were adults – the list of these claims has been written of elsewhere. The sex abuse narrative and victimology has shaped our environments deeply.

What is scarey now, decades later, is how the narrative of this group who were expelled has not been documented well. The term pedophile is now replaced by the term sex abuser, thus aided the further ‘disappearance’ of the sexual identity of the minor attracted individual. The comments you make in your post of how young academics and writers are now crippled by that ignorance is a very important point to stress. We are in real danger of seeing a part of what happened just disappear inside the dominant narrative our time.

Were Stanley’s opinions in this particular regard not widely shared by those on the left and if his slanders did not reinforce opinions broadly across society, I might be inclined to agree with you. The problem is that his views on child sexuality and child lovers prevail throughout the left/right political spectrum. I could just as easily have picked the ravings of an angry feminist and encountered roughly the same libels and spurious claims.

Even amongst those finding Ginsberg’s ideas and poetry praiseworthy, rarely is there much attention paid to his embrace of pederasty. That has been left to his detractors, alone, to use as a cudgel against him. Camille Paglia comes to mind as one of the very few exceptions to that rule. And the more time that has gone by, the more unmentionable has become that topic among his fans.

When confronted with the evidence, more often than not, the response is something like: “it was a different time and we did not yet know how terribly damaging child molestation was. How dreadfully naive people were. We now know better.”

Sadly, that is about as positive as it gets these days.

I cannot speak to the two recent films based upon him as I have not seen them, although I need to.

While it is important to make distinctions between the various ideologues, as they certainly do exist, the hatred of child lovers is so viscerally held and bluntly expressed across political boundaries that, right-wing or not, Stanley felt an obligation to identify Andrea Dworkin’s rage against pedophiles, in general and Allen Ginsberg, in particular, as praiseworthy.

I realize that some on the left argue that the gender feminists do not actually belong on the left but, they were – nevertheless – clearly embraced by much of the left and rarely praised by the right.

Even so, since “left” and “right” appear to have little inherent and immutable meaning (to my mind) except their reliance upon state coercion and -ultimately – violence, I find those terms inadequate to the task of describing essential and salient political principles and orientations.

To my mind, as a libertarian for whom both “left” and “right” ideologies are both unacceptably authoritarian, I prefer to describe policy as “liberal” (in the classical, non-statist sense) and “authoritarian”, recognizing that those on both the left and right argue for (somewhat different) distributions of “liberalism” and “authoritarianism” (but mostly “authoritarianism”).

Regardless, you could spin around – blindfolded – and be fairly confident of hitting one of our detractors with a dart.

Hello Sugarboy,
Are you misreading Rind? Or, am I misreading you? Rind found that sexual relations between adolescents and adult males are not harmful. Your statement triggered me to purchase “Censoring Sex Research: The Debate over Male Intergenerational Relations” (2013) by: Thomas K Hubbard (Editor), Beert Verstraete (Editor), Daniel C. Tsang (Foreword). Bruce Rind told a friend he totally supports this book. Check it out. It is available in libraries in The US, The UK, The Netherlands, Germany and South Africa. Search WorldCat for a library near you.

Bruce Rind’s work is science and has been grudgingly found so by The American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Association For The Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science the premier science association in the world. The Psychologists who ignore this are violating the Due Process Rights of their patients and those they testify against in court. Are Constitutional Rights important? YES! Should psychologists be fined and ordered to incorporate the Rind Studies found to be science in their practice and court testimonies? YES!
Linca
PS: “Benjamin Britten: A Life In The Twentieth Century” is now available in the US. According to reviews a person should also read a 1993 biography of Britten to get a more confident look at his relations with boys: “Benjamin Britten: A Biography” by: Humphrey Carpenter.

Is there any substitute for knowledge? NO! L

PSS: Britten once said, “If you want to know me listen to my music.” “Britten: Death in Venice” [Blu-ray] (2014) Graham-Hall (Actor), Henderson (Actor), MacGibbon (Director) will be released in the US on March 25, 2014. That is next week. L

Hi Linca,
Maybe I expressed myself badly. What I meant is that, since the Rind report has shown that wanted sexual contacts are not harmful per se, society should be even more sympathetic to child sexuality and child lovers today than it was back then – just because “we now know better”.

Very Good SugarBoy,
I knew something was not quite right in your wording. At the very least that was my hope. My fingers were crossed.

Here is the Summary and Conclusion of Rind’s 1998 Meta Analysis:

“Beliefs about CSA in American culture center on the viewpoint that CSA by nature is such a powerfully
negative force that (a) it is likely to cause harm, (b) most children or adolescents who experience it will be affected, (c) this harm will typically be severe or intense, and (d) CSA will have an equivalently negative impact on both boys and girls. Despite this widespread belief, the empirical evidence from college and national samples suggests a more cautious opinion. Results of the present review do not support these assumed properties; CSA does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender in the college population. The finding that college samples closely parallel national samples with regard to prevalence of CSA, types of experiences, self-perceived effects, and CSA-symptom relations strengthens the conclusion that CSA is not a propertied phenomenon and supports Constantine’s (1981) conclusion that CSA has no inbuilt or inevitable outcome or set of emotional reactions.

An important reason why the assumed properties of CSA failed to withstand empirical scrutiny in the current review is that the construct of CSA, as commonly conceptualized by researchers, is of questionable scientific validity. Overinclusive definitions of abuse that encompass both willing sexual experiences accompanied by positive reactions and coerced sexual experiences with negative reactions produce poor predictive validity. To achieve better scientific validity, a more thoughtful approach is needed by researchers when labeling and categorizing events that have heretofore been defined sociolegally as CSA ( Fishman, 1991 ; Kilpatrick, 1987 ; Okami, 1994 ; Rind & Bauserman, 1993 ).

One possible approach to a scientific definition, consistent with findings in the current review and with
suggestions offered by Constantine (1981) , is to focus on the young person’s perception of his or her
willingness to participate and his or her reactions to the experience. A willing encounter with positive
reactions would be labeled simply adult -child sex, a value-neutral term. If a young person felt that he or she did not freely participate in the encounter and if he or she experienced negative reactions to it, then child sexual abuse, a term that implies harm to the individual, would be valid. Moreover, the term child should be restricted to nonadolescent children ( Ames & Houston, 1990 ). Adolescents are different from children in that they are more likely to have sexual interests, to know whether they want a particular sexual encounter, and to resist an encounter that they do not want. Furthermore, unlike adult-child sex, adult-adolescent sex has been commonplace cross-culturally and historically, often in socially sanctioned forms, and may fall within the “normal” range of human sexual behaviors ( Bullough, 1990 ; Greenberg, 1988 ; Okami, 1994 ). A willing encounter between an adolescent and an adult with positive reactions on the part of the adolescent would then be labeled scientifically as adult-adolescent sex, while an unwanted encounter with negative reactions would be labeled adolescent sexual abuse. By drawing these distinctions, researchers are likely to achieve [Page 47] a more scientifically valid understanding of the nature, causes, and consequences of the heterogeneous collection of behaviors heretofore labeled CSA.

Finally, it is important to consider implications of the current review for moral and legal positions on CSA. Ifit is true that wrongfulness in sexual matters does not imply harmfulness ( Money, 1979 ), then it is also true that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness. Moral codes of a society with respect to sexual behavior need not be, and often have not been, based on considerations of psychological harmfulness or
health (cf. Finkelhor, 1984 ). Similarly, legal codes may be, and have often been, unconnected to such
considerations ( Kinsey et al., 1948 ). In this sense, the findings of the current review do not imply that moralor legal definitions of or views on behaviors currently classified as CSA should be abandoned or even altered.

The current findings are relevant to moral and legal positions only to the extent that these positions are based on the presumption of psychological harm.”

In a debate in my LGBT support group Monday night the person I was debating with who is definitely an assimilationist/feminist/straight gay said, “It is going to take more than one or two studies.” That is a technique to put Rind on the same level with their studies. Rind’s Meta Analysis is the only scientific study to be denounced by Congress. That alone puts it on the level of Galileo’s findings supporting the Copernican theory which supports a sun-centered solar system, in other words the earth is not the center of the universe. Tried for heresy and imprisoned and remained unrepentant. Rind remains unrepentant and stronger than ever repeating his studies twice again with the same results. Rind’s findings IMO remain on the level of Galileo’s.

It is my hope that repeating his summary and conclusion here will help others understand just what Rind said and give us all tools to debate those we must debate. The words of “Just A Guy” about the red herring of imbalance of power argument of the feminist sure have helped me.
Linca

Linca, part of the above quote from Rind et al. says this: “If it is true that wrongfulness in sexual matters does not imply harmfulness ( Money, 1979 ), then it is also true that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of wrongfulness.”

Tom,
All that is meant by that is the person’s morals. Might be no harm but would be wrong in the person’s eyes. I think that is what is meant. Or, maybe in the eyes of the society a person lives in or in the law. That is what I use to consider my actions. I might think no harm will come of my action but it would be wrong because the law says it is wrong whether I like it or not. I will not do it because it would be wrong. But all along I will be thinking of ways to change the law. There are probably lots of other angles to this that I am not thinking of right now.
Linca

We are surrounded. This is not a new condition for “Man The Hunted”, i.e., “Man The Hunted” by Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman. During the hundreds of thousands of years it took us to become man we learned how to deal with the Wild Cats, Crocodiles, and Snakes we live with, thus our big brains, our living closely together, our natural mentoring of the young, our long lives even then.

It has taken me a long time to realize that the feminists/left leaning people are akin to the snakes we learned to live with, the police are akin to the crocodiles we learned to live with and the predator bankers are akin to the wildcats we have learned to live with. Avoidance is a pretty good strategy. Avoidance requires knowledge. And, room for those wild things to live within natural barriers.

Someone that reads and sometimes contributes here once said, “The only reason the Bonobos exist is that the Congo River keeps the Gorillas away from them.”

Eric,
And, of course Allen’s predecessor: Walt Whitman. I remember as a 17-year-old setting in American Literature Class when the teacher introduced us to him. My o My Whitman’s words blue the hinges off my doors. Finally there was a writer who knew me, who knew what I had experienced. “Leaves of Grass” a 40 year long poem. He even described the foundry I had worked in since I was 12. He knew that dark space; he knew those kind workmen, soulful, oppressed workmen and cared about them.

Ginsberg once came to the University I live close to. He was a frail old man but when he sat down in that rocking chair upon the stage and rang that prayer bell he came to life as a kind soulful workman. Don’t remember the words just the feel. Of course boys were attracted to him, attracted as you were. One of the University boys on The Speakers Bureau said, “I think he kind of likes me.” That is what we Paedo’s do, we love the boys, the boys condemned to work in the factories, warehouses, stores and banks or drive the trucks of owners of people.

We have got to somehow some way learn what to do, how to deal with the bully feminist, hetros, straight gays who are putting us in prisons, shaming us, banishing us. I think the key to dealing with them is understanding bullies are made and then we work to undermine how they are made, i.e., undermining their scholarship with counter-scholarship and never discounting our counter-scholars like discounting Bruce Rind. What he has done and what he is doing is “Science”. People far superior to us have determined that. Who are we to say, “Well, but….” as if we were scientists?

Kind, Gentle, Soulful Allen, God Rest His Soul. I see him in my mind’s eye now setting in that rocking chair upon that university stage, ringing his bell, beginning his kind, gentle, soulful words. Thank you Eric for reminding me of this and warning all of us that this goodness is being buried to be forgotten, buried and being replaced by prison, fear, shame, banishment, ignorance.

We can do something about ignorance. Tom O is trying, many reading here are trying. A sales manager I once had always reminded us salesmen, “Steers try.” And, sent us on our way to “Practice” like what Major League Hitters, like what Major League Pitchers.
Linca

Eric Tazelaar’s piece sits well with me, and I have said as much on my Facebook site where I offer a link to this post. Those of us who are older need to ask what have this strategy and regime of adult care done for the lives experienced by the young.

Tim Stanley is a right-wing Roman Catholic of indeterminate sexuality, of exactly the sort that the Daily Telegraph likes so much. He is a great admirer of the Republican Party in the US, and has written a glowing biography of American politico-evangelist Pat Buchanan. His main claim to fame is beating up the flames of the ‘history wars’ over the UK school curriculum. This is not a man whose opinions on anything at all should be taken seriously by anyone at all.